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Good technology has value, but leading social networks require "network effects." Facebook is infinitely more valuable because all your friends are on it. Facebook has leveraged this "critical mass" of users to stay ahead of new rivals, too. Why visit Twitter, you may ask, when Facebook has continually extended its feature set to keep up with its less popular competitor? The story of social networks is in fact a story about network effects: How can a service reach a point at which there are enough users and content to be useful?

Epicenter The Business of Tech Google Poaches Social Search Service Aardvark * By Ryan Singel Email Author * February 11, 2010 | * 3:49 pm | * Categories: Search * aardvark-answer1The coolest search engine you've never used got snapped up by Google Thursday for a reported $50 million. Aardvark, a company that lets you use IM, Twitter and e-mail to ask full-text questions and then get answers from people in or close to your social network, confirmed it signed a deal with Google. TechCrunch, which first reported the news, put the figure at $50 million, but Wired.com could not confirm the purchase price.

But the last thing savvy tech companies want is for a product to end up as a frequent mention in #fail on Twitter. Yet that is exactly where Google Buzz was frequently mentioned, just hours after many consumers started to play with the new tool. One of the complaints was that Buzz seemed to have a mind of its own, picking names in your email inbox , and selecting them randomly for you to follow in your "Buzz" network. "Thanks Google Buzz, I'm automatically following 3 ex-girlfriends. #fail," wrote Tony Pitluga of Pittsburgh in a tweet that was widely re-tweeted last week. Another problem users discovered is that Google makes public everything you do in Buzz in its search engine, unless you set the privacy settings ahead of time.

The Toronto-based startup Thoora promises to gauge how well individual news stories are doing by analyzing and calibrating real-time data from blogs, mainstream news sources and Twitter. Thoora's software uses more than 100 attributes to determine not only the most popular content but also the highest quality, using measures such grammar and spelling and the authority of sites that link to the content.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.

Chris Anderson, Wired's editor in chief, discusses the Internet's challenge to the traditional press

Will the next generation read news reports? It looks like it. Some 62% of US internet users aged 12 to 17 are going online for news and political information or find out about current events, said a study conducted by the Pew Research Center published yesterday. During special events such as general elections news consumption rose to 77%.

Blog post about a media center that may forever change the way we consume media. "Boxee is a media center for the age of broadband and social networking. It doesn't just play media stored on your computer; it indexes hundreds (possibly thousands) of streaming videos from, amongst others: ABC, NBC, Comedy Central, and (thanks to a little browser-based trickery) Hulu. It's also a platform for widgets and apps that can pull in additional content from services like Pandora, Netflix, and MLB.TV. Plus, like any piece of software worth its digital weight in bytes, Boxee integrates with social networks like Twitter and Facebook for sharing what your watching with others."

Facebook changes policy on privacy settings. Wants to be more open like Twitter. Raises privacy concerns.

"TV's Twittercooler dividend suggests one thing for old-media folks wrestling with the problem of new media: don't look at it as a problem. Social media have turned the world into one big living room. The future belongs to those who pull up a chair."

Sponsors are looking to generate buzz for ads through social media, hoping to repeat the success of Super Bowl advertisers who expanded their audience by using social networking sites to spread ads.

AOL is developing a website that compiles user-generated news stories on important, hot-button issues like "The Best Twitter Backgrounds" and "The Top 6 Things Snuck into Space."

Super Bowl advertisers are using social media like Facebook and Twitter to build hype for their advertisements (not necessarily the game itself, although a larger audience for the game would also mean a larger audience for the commercials during the game).

Interesting article about dual screen viewing. What are the habits of those that tweet while watching?